


Benediction

by NahaFlowers



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst, Hallucinations, M/M, eventual hurt/comfort, this is the longest and saddest thing I have written for this fandom so far, unreality cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-21 07:02:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11352297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NahaFlowers/pseuds/NahaFlowers
Summary: This time it was Thomas’s turn to recoil. Still, it was the first semblance of emotion he had seen on Thomas’s face since he had entered the room, and he felt a sick, twisted gladness at it. Thomas turned away, rubbed his face in his hand. He spoke again, and this time his voice was full of vitriol, of barely suppressed rage. “You arenot real,” he spat. “You are aphantom. Howdareyou make me doubt myself, again and again. The real James would not have done this. You are as bad as them.” He turned around to look at James, and James almost gasped at the ragged pain in Thomas’s eyes. “If James was ever to come and get me,saveme,” he said, derisively, “then he would have come years ago. Before I becamethis.” He said this with a steady conviction, as if it was something he had told himself, told this apparition of James, a dozen times over.James finds out that Thomas is alive and has been released from Bedlam much earlier than in canon. He sails back to London immediately, with Miranda, to reunite with him.Unfortunately, Thomas is convinced he is a hallucination.





	Benediction

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the prompt 'What are you doing in my house?' on Tumblr. Instead of going the route of making it a hilarious, lighthearted first meeting AU (which I thought I was going to do), my brain jumped in and whispered ' _make it angsty_ '. So here we are. Enjoy?

“What are you doing in my house?”

James looked around from where he had been admiring the painting above the mantelpiece. It was a reminder that here he was, home at last. Home for Thomas.

But Thomas was looking at him blankly, almost as if he didn’t recognise him. Worse, he looked gaunt and thin and hollowed out, not just in body but in soul, spirit, mind. God, what _had_ they done to him in that place?

“Thomas, it’s me,” said James, uncertainly, disbelief slipping into his tone. Somehow, although he had been warned what to expect, he had not expected this blankness, this complete lack of recognition on Thomas’s face. It unsettled him. “Don’t you recognise me?”

Thomas let out a harsh sound which James belatedly realised was a laugh; but not a laugh that he had ever heard from Thomas Hamilton while he had known him. “Of course I recognise you.” The relief that burned in James’s chest then was quickly and brutally extinguished by Thomas’s next words. “You are a ghost, come back to haunt me. A demon, a _monster_.” James recoiled as if he had been slapped, although Thomas was still all the way across the room from him. “I have seen you dozens of times, in my parlour, my office, my bedroom. In _that_ place. You come to torment me.”

James closed his eyes, fighting back tears. “Thomas, it’s me. It’s James. I don’t know what they’ve done to you, what they’ve said to make you doubt your own eyes but…I promise, it’s me. Here,” he said, moving forward, extending a gentle hand, the way one would to a spooked dog, “touch me. See for yourself.”

This time it was Thomas’s turn to recoil. Still, it was the first semblance of emotion he had seen on Thomas’s face since he had entered the room, and he felt a sick, twisted gladness at it. Thomas turned away, rubbed his face in his hand. He spoke again, and this time his voice was full of vitriol, of barely suppressed rage. “You are _not real_ ,” he spat. “You are a _phantom_. How _dare_ you make me doubt myself, again and again. The real James would not have done this. You are as bad as them.” He turned around to look at James, and James almost gasped at the ragged pain in Thomas’s eyes. “If James was ever to come and get me, _save_ me,” he said, derisively, “then he would have come years ago. Before I became _this_.” He said this with a steady conviction, as if it was something he had told himself, told this apparition of James, a dozen times over.

James sunk to the floor, to his knees, the control he’d fought so hard for all his life escaping him completely. “Thomas, please,” he said, beginning to weep. “Please, I’m so sorry, you’re right, I should have come for you years ago, I never should have let them take you away in the first place, you should not have spent _one night_ in that wretched place.” James placed his hands on the cold stone floor, as if to prove to himself that he was real, and breathed hard.  He looked up at Thomas, desperately, a man before his executioner, for surely James could not convince himself to live any longer if Thomas would not accept him, would not even believe in his existence. “What can I do to prove to you I am real?”

Thomas scoffed, but then, almost as if could not help it, lowered his eyes searchingly to James’s. “I do not know.” He broke eye contact and looked away, his voice sad and distant. “I spent so much time in that place convincing myself I wasn’t mad, that seeing you was just my imagination playing tricks on me, and if I could know that, then I wasn’t mad. If I tell you to come here, to touch me, and you feel real, then how am I to know that I have not just succumbed to the madness entirely? Conversely, what if you are not real, but a version of you I have seen in the past were? And I rejected you then, because I didn’t believe you were real? I don’t think I could bear it.”

“Could you bear it if I were real, and you rejected me now?” said James, holding his breath as he waited for Thomas to answer.

Thomas looked conflicted, trapped, as if his magnificent brain had exhausted all possibilities and could not find a way out. James hated himself for being the one to put that look on his face.

“Maybe,” said James slowly, “I could tell you all that has happened since we were parted, and then you could decide for yourself whether I am real.”

Thomas nodded, equally as slowly. “All right,” he said. Then he gestured to the chairs in front of the fireplace. “Will you sit?” he asked, in a strained voice, the trained politeness that even extended to a ghost. James nodded, feeling his heart clench.

“Why didn’t you come for me?” said Thomas immediately James had sat down.

James took a deep breath. “Do you remember that day?” he asked, gently. “When they came to take you away?”

Thomas opened his mouth, paused, and then opened it again. “I remember the morning. I remember waking up with my arms around you, your hair a halo on the pillow, your face soft in sleep. Softer than it ever was when you were awake.” He heaved a sigh. “That’s how I tried to remember you. _Try_ to remember you,” he corrected himself, angrily. “Soft, in my arms, in my bed.”

James’s face softened, his expression open, vulnerable, lain bare by Thomas as he always had been. Thomas continued.

“Then you woke up, and we kissed, a good long while if I remember rightly.” They shared a smile at that. “Then you said you had to get to the Admiralty, speak to Admiral Hennessey of our plans-” Here, James’s expression turned stony, “and though I clung to you for one last kiss, I let you go because this was important. The most important.” An agonised expression creased Thomas’s face. “I let you _go_.”

James could hardly breathe. “And after that?” he said, voice barely above a whisper.

Thomas waved a tired hand. “After that it’s all a blur. My father’s men came, or men from Bedlam, I was never entirely sure who they were. They took me away. I remember voices, shouting, Miranda and I, although I can’t remember what she said. And Peter just…stood there, and I didn’t understand at the time, until he visited me in hospital.” He looked at James, expression grave. “He betrayed us.”

“ _What_?” James exclaimed, standing up suddenly. “I’ll kill him!”

Thomas winced.

“I’m sorry,” said James, sitting down quickly. “But really, Peter?”

“My father threatened him, his family, his _daughter_. I have had an entire lifetime to learn to stand up to my father. Other men are not so,” he searched for the word, and his mouth twisted ironically, “ _lucky_.”

James grimaced.

“But we are not here to talk about me, nor Peter. We are here to talk about you.” Thomas regarded James the way he had seen Thomas regard many an opponent in his salons, and to have that calculating scrutiny turned on him full-force was enough to make him squirm in his seat, and fumble for his words for a matter of moments.

“When I returned from the Admiralty, that day,” said James, eventually, “after being confronted by your father, and told to leave London…I was not planning to abandon you.”

“No?” said Thomas, in a politely interested tone, as if he had just said that he did not enjoy the tea, rather than admitting he had completely failed the man he loved.

“No,” said James, swallowing a lump in his throat. “No, of course not.” He closed his eyes, gathering the strength to go on. He opened them, bright and agonised, to meet Thomas’s. “I came back determined to get you out, or die trying. But Miranda said- she told me that you had said, before you left, that we were to stay together, to look after each other.”

Thomas sighed in comprehension. _That_ was what he had said.

“I couldn’t-” James’s voice broke. “That was your last request. That we look after each other. That I look after Miranda. I- I couldn’t do that if I got caught trying to rescue you, tried, hanged. I couldn’t- I couldn’t do that if I was dead.”

Thomas bowed his head, though whether in understanding or sorrow or just because he could not bear to look at him, James didn’t know.

“So we went to Nassau.”

Thomas looked up sharply. “You went to _Nassau_?”

James nodded. “Yes. Didn’t Peter tell you?”

Thomas shook his head. “He told me very little, and nothing of you or Miranda, even when I asked for it. Even when I _begged_ for it,” he added, self-hatred lancing through every word. “I think he just wanted me to unburden him of his guilt,” he said, bitterly.

“He didn’t deserve your forgiveness,” James said, his voice tight.

“Then who does?” said Thomas, so simply that it knocked the breath out of James.

He looked up at Thomas, a mere shell of himself, a feared pirate captain and former naval officer brought down and scooped out by a mere few words from this man. “None of us,” said James, hoarsely. “None of us do.”

“Maybe not,” said Thomas quietly, a small smile playing on his lips. “But that’s for me to decide.” He paused. “You were saying you went to Nassau?”

James nodded hard until he found his voice again. “Yes. I…became a pirate captain,” he said, a little ruefully.

Thomas looked surprised but also amused. “If you can’t beat them, join them, I suppose,” he said, thoughtfully.

“Something like that,” said James, wondering why he didn’t tell Thomas why he became a pirate captain – so he could be respected by them, feared if necessary, so he could make alliances, bring peace and prosperity to Nassau, as Thomas had wanted. So he could wage war on the British Empire, in Thomas’s name and his memory.

“What about Miranda?” Thomas asked. “Is she alive?” He leaned forward, anxiously, and then snapped back into a rigid position, angry with himself. A perverse part of James took pleasure in the fact that Thomas was beginning to believe the story, forgetting his assertion that James had to be a hallucination.

James nodded. “She is, thank God. She- she said she thought it would be best if only one of us was to see you, first. Didn’t want to overwhelm you.”

Thomas laughed, a real laugh this time, as if to say, _well, that worked well, didn’t it?_ James smiled too, in relief as much as anything, for it really did appear that Thomas was coming to accept his version of events as true, and James to be real. Then something dark shuttered over Thomas’s face and all was in shadow again.

“That sounds a plausible enough story,” he said, “but also one that I could have told to myself. Why did you come, and not Miranda?”

James shrugged uncomfortably. “She said it should be me.”

“Why, James?” said Thomas, unable to stop his body from betraying his anticipation.

“She said…because I was the one you loved most. And because I- I love you more than I could ever love anyone, anything else. You are my truest love.”

Thomas nodded, attempting to keep a mask of emotionless interest on his face, but for James, who knew him so well, the lines of pain around his mouth and eyes betrayed him. “But I know all this,” he said, despondently. “How am I to accept that you are real if you merely tell me things I already know?”

“I could fetch Miranda,” he suggested, trying not to show how Thomas’s dismissal of his love, always so hard for James to put voice to, had hurt. Thomas shook his head, reaching out an involuntary hand before snatching it back. “Or a servant,” James added.

“If you leave my sight,” said Thomas in a tortured, wracked voice, “I am afraid you will disappear forever.” He cracked a mocking grin at himself. “You can see I am not quite as strong in the face of my fantasies as I try to pretend. I like to live in them for a while.”

“How long?” said James urgently.

“What?”

“How long do you live in them? _Have_ you lived in them? Because I will stay here for a day, a month, a year, until you are ready to believe in me, until I can take you away from me with your full consent and knowledge that I _am_ real, that I _did_ come back for you. Too late to be worth anything, perhaps,” he sighed. “But nevertheless, I am here.”

“James, please…please don’t,” said Thomas, looking aghast, marooned on the island of his own disbelief, the sea of his imagination not quite lapping at his feet. “I need to know now,” he said, “or I need you to go, and stay gone.”

Against all odds, James smiled. “Did I ever tell you about Flint?” he asked softly.

Thomas wrinkled his brow. “No…no, I don’t think so. The name rings something of a bell, and yet…”

James interrupted him. “In his youth, my grandfather was a deckhand on a privateer, off the coast of Massachusetts. One night, he was alone at night, on the late watch, at anchor in the Boston Harbour, when he saw a man, climbing out of the water, onto the ship. He didn’t know him. He thought about raising an alarm, ringing the bell, but his curiosity got the better of him. The man approached my grandfather and asked for a little rum. The man said that he’d fled a fishing trawler after being accused killing one of the crew. When asked his name, the man simply replied, ‘Mr Flint.’ He never told my grandfather if he was guilty of the killing, or why he chose that particular ship; eventually, my grandfather left to fetch some more rum, and when he returned, the stranger was gone; vanished into the night. He was in Boston for a month after that, and never heard word of a killing or a fugitive at large. It was as if the sea had conjured him out of nothing, and then taken him back for some unknowable reason.” James paused and looked at Thomas; he was wide-eyed and shaking, and appeared to be holding his breath. “That’s who I became,” said James, looking carefully into Thomas’s eyes, waiting for a spark of recognition, of belief. “Conjured by the ocean and by my grief. Captain Flint.”

“James,” Thomas whispered brokenly, and James closed his eyes, let tears fall down his cheeks. “James,” said Thomas in a stronger but still shaking voice. He edged forward and took James’s face in his hands. He whimpered. “It’s you.”

James took Thomas’s own face in his hands, and leaned their foreheads together. “Yes,” said James, more tired than he could ever remember being before. “It’s me.” He kissed Thomas’s forehead. “It’s me.”

Then they dissolved into a maelstrom of kisses and tears, until they were left leaning weakly against one another, weeping.

Thomas reached down, held his hand. “I was _so sure_ it couldn’t be you, sure you were just another hallucination.” He sighed shakily, stroking his thumb almost ritually along James’s. “I didn’t dare allow myself to get my hopes up.” He looked up into James’s eyes, using his other thumb to stroke his bottom lip tenderly. “Can you forgive me? For putting you through that?”

That damn near broke James. “ _Forgive_ you? What is there to forgive? You are my dearest, sweetest love, my entire heart…” The endearments seemed to be falling from his lips easily now, almost as unbidden as his tears. “What could I ever possibly have to forgive you for?” Thomas leant forward, gently smiling, to kiss him, but in the last moment, James drew abruptly back. Thomas wailed, and the sound, so utterly broken and desperate, sent a dagger through James’s heart. James looked at him, pained. “The question is, can you ever forgive me?”

Thomas looked taken aback. “For what?” he asked.

James nearly cried out. _For what?_ “For doing this to you. For leaving you here.”

Thomas’s eyes snapped to his. “James, you can’t believe what you said, what I said earlier? Those were words to a ghost, one I believed I had to fight. You- you have been done wrong as much as I have. You were put in an impossible position. You were trying to honour my last request.” Thomas looked into James’s eyes, honestly, earnestly. “I do not blame you for that.” He nuzzled his nose into James’s neck, just breathing in the smell of him. “You are here now.”

James smiled into the back of Thomas’s neck, but there was still pain and self-loathing there. “Even so,” he said into his neck. “I should have come earlier. I should not have let you suffer so.” This time he waited for Thomas to pull back, which he did eventually, reluctantly, still holding tight to James and touching him in every place he possibly could. He looked back at James. “I should like forgiveness for that, even if you think there is no need.”

“Very well,” said Thomas, his lips twitching into a benedictory smile. “I forgive you.” He whispered the words into James’s forehead, which he then blessed with two kisses, a baptism more truthful and powerful than any religion, and James was born anew.

“Thank you,” he said, starting to weep controllably for what felt like the hundredth time that day. He kissed Thomas everywhere he could reach. “Thank you.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is the longest fic I've written for this fandom so far. It's also, I think, the one I'm proudest of. I would really, really appreciate a comment if you have a moment.


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